Ms. Grants grade 6/7 class joined our classroom last week and gave us the opportunity to share our T-Shirt Factory Projects.  This was a large project that involved students building a t-shirt warehouse that focused on addition of 3 double digit numbers, involving numerous strategies: number lines, friendly numbers and splitting.  Once students had created a warehouse, they then sorted their t-shirts into S/M/L.  Students were able to track how many t-shirts they had, and the total cost for the 3 sizes and their entire warehouse. Once students were comfortable with what they had, then I (Ms. Burrows) purchased small groups of t-shirts from each warehouse a variety of sizes at $10.00 a t-shirt.  Students then had to collaborate with their partners to subtract from their warehouse and recalculate their total values.  Again, because this was a meaningful problem our students will walk away with a variety of tools for addition and subtraction.  Students learned how to collaborate and share ideas.  The amount of math conversation was fantastic.

Here are some pictures of our grade 3’s sharing.